It is not an issue.

I'd feel a little more sanguine about agreeing with you if not for GC's quote:
"Only white attacks can stack the Sea of Vengeance / Corruption dot. However special abilities should still trigger the bonus weapon damage. I'm not sure the current PTR build you have reflects that last bit."

He posted it in the DPS forum, so perhaps he didn't think anyone would care about Prot's hammer, but his statement is pretty definite.

IMO, Blizz felt that Ret was still too bursty in PvP and was too good at AoE in PvE but was too weak at sustained single target dps AND Prot was a little too good at building AoE threat, so they were shooting to kill 4 birds with one stone.

That quote only refers to special abilities like crusader strike and divine storm which previously procced seals. They are just saying that on the PTRs these abilities may not trigger the 33% damage proc, similar to how crusader strike and divine storm trigger seal of blood right now. It should have no effect whatsoever on hammer hits. there is a reason he posted in the dps forums, because it doesn't matter for us. Even if it doesnt apply the dot by using hammer, its not a huge aoe threat loss tbh, since most of our snap threat comes from the initial damage of hammer, avengers shield (unless you have the glyph, which for aoe tanking you shouldn't), and consecrate. Considering hammer has a 6 second cooldown, it would take 24 seconds (if you opened with it) to get 3 (or 4) mobs with full stacks, which is only 800-900 damage / 3 seconds, or around 1k tps, and before this point it is even less threat. So i wouldn't worry about it.

I know Blizzard has made plenty of errors before, but I think if the patch notes say that a specific spell can trigger a specific effect, it's okay to take that at face value.

Regarding Vindication, I'm a believer in the philosophy of "tanks should take tanking-related talents whenever possible" for basically the reasons pamela said. There's no combination of raid-mates you can come up with that will guarantee that you always have an AP debuff on the mob you're tanking. But Vindication does that.

Any information on how much AP will be reduced by vindication? Will a talented warrior's demo shout be more effective? This would be helpful information to know to decide whether it is worth getting if you are guaranteed to have a warrior in your raids that is talented as such.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Vindication

Nevermind, it is as strong as a talented warrior's demo shout currently

Yah, its worth the 2% crit loss talent wise i guess.

In addition if said Warrior is Fury, then you'll free him up to pick up a fully improved Commanding Shout.

Since AD can't be leapfrogged anymore, Blood Draining becomes pretty damn good. Any data from PTR to suggest that Bladewarding is going to be actually useful on a boss fight?

Wow Web Stats

A quick test on the PTR with my old [Last Laugh] enchanted with blade warding. The new SoV procs and dot seem to help increase uptime quite a lot for paladins, WWS lists it as 26%. I even had a few 3 stack procs of blade warding, which on live at the moment is a once in a blue moon thing. In a raid I'm sure you'd see better procs due to haste buffs and not having to modulate mana regen like when soloing Thrym.

The DoT is not helping but the application of it seems to be triggering weapon procs. This is similar to the ret situation with near 100% beserking uptime. This still doesn't mean that bladewarding will be the premier tanking enchant since the same, likely bugged, mechanics are in effect for mongoose and blood draining stack rebuilding. test those two as well and see how they fare.

So I assume you would pick Blood draining if you want survival, blade warding for avoidance, and hit/str if you want threat.

With the buff to SoV (more weapon strikes) and block value, Prot is about 1k dps higher than other tanks.

This isn't nearly enough to put blade warding incontrovertibly ahead of mongoose. Using average stats given, blade warding gives 65.52 parry rating including stacking procs. Mongoose with kings gives an average of 60.72 agility and 121.44 armor.

That method is to show that they are close to begin with but there are factors not taken into account that hurt baldewarding more than mongoose. The avoidance comes in chunks and with DR it means that those chunks are worth less avoidance than the average of the procs. This hits bladewarding especially hard since it's chunks are larger, it has a worse DR curve, and it can stack for a huge hit in DR. Next is the issue of faster hitting mobs and multiple mobs. In that situation blade warding goes up a little with additional HotR procs (on multi) but severely down with the faster parries and thus consumption of the stack while mongoose stays the same or goes up on multiple mobs. Next is bladewarding getting worse with the more parry you have, not only because of higher DR(which mongoose also suffers) but also because of native parry chance reducing the uptime of the enchant.

Suffice to say that a lot more math needs to be done before we can make a declaration and the devil is in the details. And nailing down the uptime some more can make a significant difference to the final numbers as well, since 1% higher on mongoose or lower on bladewarding can swing the favor another way.

Blood draining has never been a good enchant, a 2400ish heal when you get under 35% is shit compared to how hard bosses actually hit. If you want survival go for mongoose, even with the buffs to parry i think it will still be a better enchant because it will also contribute to an increase in threat. Until they buff blood draining, it's disqualified as a viable tanking enchant in my book. A 2400 heal isn't going to save you when you get hit for 15-20k + a hit. The static 1% or so avoidance from either bladewarding or mongoose is much more suitable. Why can't they just release a stam weapon enchant =(.

if I'm understanding this correctly you think that 2.5K less healing needed to get your hp high enough to survive the next hit is worthless while ~700-800 more hp is amazing? Those two view points don't work together.

This is an incredibly misinformed post.

Firstly, the stam weapon enchant was considered and discarded because it was identical to simply adding X (75 from memory) stamina to all tanks. It didn't represent a choice, and simply meant that boss damage would have to be tweaked under the assumption that it was present. There's a myriad of good reasons for not having a flat stam weapon enchant in the game.

Secondly, the avoidance from Mongoose / Bladewarding is not static, it's random. A random proc on a stat that is in itself random is hardly something worth calling static.

Thirdly, on the value of a 2.4k heal vs 15-20k boss hits. Yes, it seems pitiful, but if you're expecting what would essentially equate to a guaranteed 'avoid' of any hit that took you sub-35% without killing you, then you're utterly insane. Think of it this way, what use is 24 stam (roughly 300 odd health) against 15k boss hits? Why do people gem stamina then? In reality tanking / healing is an incredibly fast-paced, dynamic, and unpredictable affair. The relationship between the two in combat is never certain and never reliable, and at the end of the day, against a 15k hit, a 2.5k heal will save your life give you enough of a buffer to survive one more hit roughly 16%, or 1 in 6 times. Due to the nature of the buff stacking, and its ability to be leapfrogged, you can't quite classify it as EH, but it's still very close, and very powerful. It's somewhat ironic that you're complaining about blood draining (based on the size of the heal, as opposed to its reliability), yet asking for a stamina enchant which would give you about a third of the "EH" as blood draining.

A blue said they were aware of the issue but no word on what their solution will be.

The patch notes for 3.2 listed at both mmo-champion and worldofraids specifically list LoO and LoSS as still being items to get the duration of their BV benefit doubled rather than the BV itself doubled. Obviously, these aren't the official patch notes yet so I'm still holding out hope for a change to LoSS but we'll have to wait and see.

Since 20-30 realms are undergoing 24-hour hardware adjustment extended maintenance, I assume the patch (and thus the notes) won't actually be arriving on Tuesday as usual. Either we'll get a 2nd maintenance this week or the patch will come next Tuesday. Looks like we'll have to wait until then to find out what's become of our librams.

Edit - *Sigh* Official patch notes are out and both librams have had their durations doubled. I assume LoSS will eventually get tweaked somehow, but for now I'm glad I never actually got rid of my LoO (not that its terribly hard to get).

2nd Edit - They've now changed the scheduled "up" time for the realms undergoing extended maintenance from Tuesday 11:59 PM PST to Tuesday 11:59 AM PST (the downtime start was consistent at 11:59 PM Monday, PST), so its a 12 hour downtime, not 24, and is only scheduled to run an hour longer than maintenance on the regular servers. "Scheduled" being the operative term. There's a good chance of a late start up.

This may be a dumb question but is divinity really worth the 5 points you spend in it to only gain 5% more healing done to you, or should i use those 5 points and put them in the ret tree so i can pick up vindication? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Vindication is massively better than divinity. Divinity is marginal at best.

Sadly, Divinity is a weak talent for tanking. What kills you is a Huge hit, staying in fire, or healers not healing.

Libram of Obstruction is better than the Ulduar one.

With the new changes to ardent defender, i can see your point, but before when ardent defender activated at around 16.5k hp or so (with 47-48k hp raid buffed), this enchant could effectively kill you (if you were brought to lets say 16k hp and the enchant healed you over your AD activated hp) if a 20k hit followed (vs. the 14k that would have hit if you were at 16k hp instead of 18k). But i guess now you are right, it is probably the best enchant out there for paladin tanks in terms of survivability. However you are also assuming that the 2.4k heal is ALWAYS up whenever you are brought sub-35%, when in reality it will probably only be a full heal very rarely, given the 5-10 sec (approximately) ICD in between stacks being applied. So in reality i think the stam enchant would actually give more 'EH', but for now, blood draining is the best we can do. In addition, i guess the value of this enchant would also depend on how quick and reactive your healers are to large bursts of incoming damage (since as you said, tanking / healing is subject to very rapid and unpredictable events). For example, if they were on their game, and never let you drop below 35% except for once every 30 seconds or so, then the enchant would give a greater 'EH' increase than if they let you drop below 35% every 10 seconds.